AI (Artificial Intelligence), ERGs, Innovation
Here’s what the data says about ERGs and their role in innovation.
Your employee resource groups (ERGs) might be your secret weapon for driving AI transformation.
Great Place To Work® research shows that ERG participants are more likely to say they use AI at least once a month than nonparticipants at typical workplaces, suggesting ERGs play an underappreciated role in accelerating AI adoption.
What explains this gap?
“ERGs are often engines of innovation because of how they cut across departments and job roles,” says Matt Bush, senior principal at Great Place To Work. “Research shows that increasing the number of people who can contribute new ideas and try new things enables organizations to generate better ideas more quickly.”
Great Place To Work data shows that members of ERGs report fewer barriers to innovation. In surveys of nearly 12,000 ERG members across 83 different groups, researchers saw that the ratio of employees who say they can easily innovate was 10 for every two employees who say they cannot easily participate in innovation. For non-ERG members at the same companies, the ratio was only six innovators for every two employees who weren’t easily innovating.
This comparison of innovators to non-innovators, known as the Innovation Velocity Ratio (IVR), is a leading indicator of how quickly new behaviors, tools, and ways of working spread across an organization. In a company, transformation efforts only gain traction when change champions begin to outnumber the skeptics.
Crucially, Great Place To Work research shows that the barriers to innovation are not at the individual level, but are often the result of environmental factors. When more employees have trust in their organization, higher numbers of employees are willing to try new things and take the calculated risks that drive progress.
Employee resource groups are uniquely positioned to accelerate change by cutting across silos in the organization and helping to socialize change.
Understanding the impact of IVR
Innovation is key to the Great Place To Work Effect, which proves the impact of high-trust culture on the bottom line.
When employees have higher levels of trust in their leaders and the overall organization, they are more likely to report trying new ways of working or developing new ideas.
At Great Place To Work Certified™ companies, for every two employees who face friction when trying to innovate, four report having lots of opportunities to try new things at work —twice the level at typical workplaces, where the ratio is just 2:2.
As a company scales, the impact becomes clearer: Being a great workplace can mean having thousands more employees open to trying new things and embracing innovation at a company with 1,000 or more employees.
IVR is one of the reasons that explains how companies on the Fortune 100 Best Companies to Work For® List see 8.5 times higher revenue per employee and 3.5 times higher stock market returns.
“A high number of employees innovating is a crucial health indicator for the organization in a rapidly changing AI-fueled business environment,” Bush says.
What ERG leaders should do
How can ERGs start to embrace AI technology to further their work and their mission within the organization?
1. Accelerate learning
“Many ERGs have talent retention as a key metric for success,” Bush says. “Training employees on AI both improves their confidence in the organization and prepares them to take new roles.”
For pilots or projects where employees are using AI tools, ERG leaders can partner with IT and learning and development teams to host AI skills labs, create peer mentoring networks and curate role-specific learning experiences.
“If something happens and they are eliminating your position, employees who can demonstrate new skills or abilities are more likely to be able to transition into a new position in the organization,” Bush says.
2. Scale coaching
AI tools might help employees scale coaching and feedback systems to every employee. One audacious goal for an ERG leader might be to ensure that every member of the group receives a satisfactory report on their annual performance review.
3. Ask AI to challenge you
“Instead of always thinking about how AI is going to make your life easier, ask: ‘How can AI challenge you more?’” Bush recommends. “If ChatGPT is too affirming, you aren’t really learning.”
Because AI is a general-purpose technology, it can either be used as a 1:1 tutor to help you learn something new or hand you answers to help you cheat on the test. Without friction, AI users aren’t learning new information.
For ERG leaders focused on developing their members, consider how you can help add a little more friction into the equation to prioritize the growth of your people.
Learn more at the ERG Experience
Explore how leading organizations are leveraging ERGs to accelerate innovation and AI adoption at the ERG Experience, part of the For All Summit™ April 21-23 in Las Vegas. Reserve your spot!
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